Aug. 19, 1970: A Day That Will Live In Infamy For Aching Backs

August 10, 1985|By Russell Baker, New York Times

NEW YORK — The news these days is mostly about anniversaries of interesting events that happened long ago. Last week, for instance, it was the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki agreement. This week it's the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. Next week it will be about the 40th anniversary of Japan's surrender.

In May the 40th anniversary of Germany's surrender produced a news bonus because of President Reagan's embarrassing visit to the Bitburg cemetery where Nazi SS troops were among the dead.

The Bitburg cemetery visit originally was scheduled because the president had enjoyed such a successful photo opportunity at the Omaha Beach cemetery in 1984 during the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

Unfortunately, only 49 weeks elapsed between the Omaha Beach cemetery appearance and the one at Bitburg, so the press was unable to hail the German appearance as the first anniversary of the president's first European-cemetery photo opportunity.

Once next week's big story about the 40th anniversary of the Japanese surrender is out of the way, we will go on to one of the more interesting anniversaries. The date: Aug. 19. On that day 15 years ago, the decision was made by the bedding industry to cease putting handles on the mattresses of America.

That decision, which was followed by all but a handful of U.S. mattress makers, was to reshape the drama of American life, as everyone who has since moved a mattress knows, possibly too well.

Chiropractors, spinal surgeons and manufacturers of plaster casts and steel-reinforced girdles reported sharp increases in business within weeks after the market was flooded with new mattresses lacking the fabric handles that once had been stoutly affixed to both sides of every decent mattress in the country.

The decision to drop the mattress handles, little noted at the time it was made, is now intensely controversial. The justification cited by the bedding industry in 1970 was that Americans were becoming dangerously soft as their work became increasingly sedentary and their culture increasingly gluttonous. Mattress spokesmen asserted that flabby Americans were dropping like flies with diseases resulting from sissified living, diseases their grandparents would have been ashamed to die of, even had they existed in the rugged old days.

The American Bedding Council -- ''determined,'' it said, ''to do our bit to save the Free World from flab'' -- ordered the mattress handles dropped from their products. ''The opportunity we extend to our countrymen to handle vast, bulky and intractable mattresses without the assistance of mattress handles should encourage millions to undertake physical-conditioning programs that will enable them, after turning their mattresses, to wrestle successfully with the largest and most formidable opponents, including bears.''

Industry spokesmen concede that the bedding council saw the estimates that forecast hundreds of thousands of back problems, but judged it sensible to accept ''a little lumbago and a few popped vertebrae here and there'' in a trade-off that would help save America from ''a devastating onset of flab.''

Critics of the decision say this is self-serving nonsense. For one thing, they say, at the time mattress handles were abandoned, the first joggers already were in the streets and 97-pound female weaklings were starting to work on weight-lifting machines.

The bedding council, critics say, had no interest in improving the nation's health. It was taking advantage of the new muscularity to add a few pennies to mattress profits by doing away with the handles.

Arguments like this are never settled, not as long as anniversaries roll around yearly giving news people a pretext for filling their space with lively controversy. This year's ceremony, designed as a photo opportunity for the president, was to feature Reagan carrying a king-size mattress, with no handles, from the White House basement to the Lincoln bedroom.

Reagan has canceled, though reluctantly, on doctors' advice, and asked Vice President Bush to fill in for him. Bush has been visiting the National Zoo after closing hours to practice by wrestling bears.